Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
Rena, I cannot answer this question that you pose, but what i can tell you is that when tenders were being sought for rolling stock for the railways Siemens(Germany) and Bombardier(Derby UK)both submitted their tenders.......who do you think was awarded the contract?
It wasn't the Derby firm.....this was because Siemens got some form of sunsidies from their government to make their tender more attractive(the playing field was tilted to make the ball roll their way)........so being in the EU did not help us there.
I do believe that if our products are good enough then there will be markets outside of the EU for them....and as it stands we currently buy far more from the EU than they buy from us.
The current deal for the wings of the Airbus only gives these plants about 2 years of guaranteed work...so after that they would be looking for something else anyway.
If the government can squander 9 million on a propaganda leaflet that isn't worth a light then maybe they should be looking at backing some of the industries in this country...but that would take some working at....some proactive thinking..... and I can't really see many thinkers in the current set up.....they all seem to want to take the line of least resistance.
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I remember the railway fiasco, brought about because Gordon Brown stood up in Parliament and announced the new policy that all government contracts would be awarded to companies that submitted the lowest tender. Thank goodness this policy changed when the Coalition came into power.
I'm pretty sure that one of Germany's steel companies was/is part owned by the German government despite the EU regulations about nationalisation. I don't know if it was Siemens though. I'll bet my bottom dollar that if one of their large companies had a downturn, the German Government would organise some sort of handout. As for the foreign owned Bombadier company. Earlier this year it announced it's having to downsize due to the vagaries of the stockmarket.
Turning to the point you raised about the aircraft industry. Coincidentally a new statue of Margaret Thatcher has been made but there's one important element missing - her handbag. During strife of the Callaghan & Foot governments the value of the £Pound had dropped which meant high inflation. When Thatcher came into government 1979 she had to bring in some money. She successfully handbagged the ministers at a Common Market meeting then stood up and told us that she'd given our revolutionary newly designed jump jet to America because we couldn't afford to manufacture it - but they had agreed for the UK to manufacture and provide aircraft parts. In the event the only orders that the Yanks sent us was to Guest, Keen & Nettlefold. When I worked for a heavy engineering company in the 1950s-60s that company only provided us with nuts and bolts :-(
I'm surprised we still have an aircraft industry after it was decimated in the 1960s after a couple of knockbacks that were publicised My late cousin worked on the TSR-2 bomber, which would have been the first supersonic aeroplane - it cost the taxpayer £Billions and was plagued with problems - the blueprints were eventually destroyed. I'm wandering off the point now but I used to get really fired up at the thought of us -v- the USA ( = "the big boys"). Late 60s- early 70s we'd (as in GB) had got an order from Australia for several aircraft - which was cancelled when the yanks went back to them & offered to sell them the same number of similar aircraft plus several others thrown in FOC. Again, when they discovered we were looking for buyers for the first supersonic passenger plane the Concord, they (and the Russians with an imaginery Concordski) went around the world trying to get orders for a plane they said they had already designed - actually they eventually had to admit they couldn't get it off the drawing board.